I'm pretty sure my comment was about this bit.

It may have been, but as I stated in both posts the preferred method would be to use the download from Mozilla. Doesn't much matter what you were referring to be honest. Stop being a douche.

I had all covered there including a warning. So bugger off.

No "may have been" at all, it was.

As others, including myself had also stated.

Hmmmm what's wrong with this scene?

All had already been convered, you added nothing new to this topic.

No.

This thread had run its course, and had everything covered, before you joined LQ and then joined this thread. Who is I'd love to see if your IP and cavedweller's IP match.

Kind of old technology there. Maybe do a little looking here you might learn something http://insecure.org/.

Really you haven't covered a thing in this thread except gripe at some one who posted a solution that didn't follow staight debian repos, or installing the debian unbranded version.

I made one comment and you started in on me. Doesn't say much for the forum with senior members like that.

1 - He did more than gripe. He also explained why the procedure is unwise to someone who is clearly misinformed.
2 - The dark turn in the thread happened when someone took offence and lashed out, because it was pointed out that his advice is not the best idea.

Since you are new here you probably need to acclimatize. So look up netiquette, check the LQ Rules and understand that what you posted was completely uncalled for. Do not do that again.

I'd send you a PM to get this off the public forum but you haven't posted enough to get a PM box yet so here goes.
It was my way of saying I wouldn't be surprised if you and cavedweller were one and the same. I'm not really all that interested in you or cavedweller, what I am interested in is that noobies get good advice.

I never claimed that I covered anything. The other poster made small but fundamental mistakes. I'd hate for a noobie to break their system because they followed Cavedwellers advice and added repos that are not Debian and then installed something that they shouldn't have. If that makes me a bad man then so be it, I can live with that.

Lolololol, I said

At no stage in that post did I have a go at you and if you think I did then you need to think what is wrong when you take an innocent comment to heart.

Don't attack the forum because of me.

That's quite enough. Please help the OP, discuss only the topic at hand and get this thread back on track,
TIA.

Going over old ground here, but a few important facts nevertheless:

- Debian patch firefox/iceweasel

- Debian also patch many of the other packages in the Debian repos

- The removal of the branding is at the insistence of mozilla because they do not permit modification of firefox and redistribution under the firefox name and branding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozill...Iceweasel_name

- If you haven't worked it out by now, this does not seem to have anything to do with free software "zealotry" or Debian not wanting to use the firefox branding because of trademarks.

- Anyone unhappy with Debian's patching of Iceweasel should not be removing it and installing firefox - they should not be running Debian at all. They should also consider avoiding all other distros who apply their own patches to upstream software.

- Most of the talk about Iceweasel not working on certain sites, is due to the user agent - which takes a few minutes to change to the firefox one (personally I've never needed to change it but YMMV).

- The talk about Iceweasel crashing more, or being more unstable than Firefox is mostly FUD. In most cases people are comparing different versions (i.e. iceweasel 3.x from stable and the latest firefox...), not a real side by side comparison with the same version of firefox built from source.

- Newer versions of iceweasel are available in backports and the http://mozilla.debian.net/ repo.

- Other perceived Iceweasel bugs may be libcairo, graphics driver or X server bugs (as has been the case on a few occasions). In many of these cases, stand alone "static" binary firefox, running from e.g. the user's home directory may not be affected by these issues (hardly surprising).

- I avoid the above problem(s) by using Opera. :)

There you have the difference between a package from Ubuntu and a package from Debian and a package from Mozilla. The tar from Mozilla will work in Mageia. The package from Ubuntu may break Debian. A FF package from Debian would, of coarse be a counterfit but if there was such a thing it may break Ubuntu.

The reason is that Ubuntu has fairly drastically deviated from the standard Linux file system. While there are some small differences in most distros, for the most part they stick with the blue print for the file system. When they get a package, from upstream like Mozilla or Debian, they have to package it for thier repos.

From Mozilla this will mean making an Ubuntu .deb package.

From Debian it will mean modifying the Debian .deb to be an Ubuntu .deb. This will mainly involve an edit of the install script which is part of that package. The install script is where the depends should be visible to dpkg and the directions for where each file in the package is to be placed.

If you run a search for a package, say Plymouth, in your favorite search engine and look at the depends for that package in both Debian and Ubuntu, they will not match. If you dig deep you can find what packages in each distro depend on Plymouth. These will not match. This is an extreme example but it illistrates the potential differences between packages in different distros.

Then there are differences in the file system that will absolutely bite you on the butt. They are less common but even more damaging. If the system is looking for a package /lib to run a certain application and that file is, in fact, installed in /usr/lib it will not run.

In that case you have 2 packages installed that use the same libwhatever file. One is native to the distro and one is from some other distro. dpkg knows that libwhatever is installed so it does not pull it in as a depend when installing the external package. You will probably get a failure message from dpkg that the install failed do to missing that file.

That is because when looking to see if the file is installed it just checkes its record of what is installed. When installing the external package it is trying to connect some file from that package to libwhatever in a particular location indicated by the install script. The package is not there.

The kind folks at Linux Mint, that maintain Cinnamon and Mate, realize that Mate is popular with a number of people. Rather than have folks breaking their system installing Mate from the LMDE repo on an Ubuntu install they have a Mate repo set up for Wheezy, Sid and Ubuntu (also Mint and LMDE). Those 3 repos have different addresses and will work on the distro and version discribed.

In most cases it is, in fact, safer to get a .rpm package somewhere and install on a .deb system using "alien" to install it than to install a .deb from an other distro.

As a side note.

The LMDE site notes that they use Debian packages. They simply are supplying a stable snapshot of Debian testing. This means that their system is fully compatible with the Debian repos and any possible instability found there.

So using Debian packages is probably safe in LMDE.

Using LMDE packages in Debian will be more risky. This is because they are relatively old packages. They are out of date.

There may be some serious depends problems with them. Installing with aptitude may get around some of these for any particular package but may leave some other packages broken because they depend on a newer version of the depend package in question.

It took a long time to get dependency hell out of installing Linux packages. Now folks have gotten the idea that any .rpm will work in any RPM system and any .deb will work in any APT system. This is not true.

It will make life more interesting and educational however. Make damned sure that you have an unadulterated install or a full backup of your install before doing these things.